We would like to take a closer look at the solution from PowerColor based on RADEON X700 chip. Equipped with a fanless cooler, this baby suits perfectly for silent systems, and taking into account its very affordable price may be a very tempting buy for many of you. But will its performance and overclocking potential be as tempting as its price and design? We will find out now!

Testbed and Methods

We used the games’ integrated benchmarks if possible. If the benchmark could produce the minimal fps rate besides the average one, we put it into the table of results and marked it in white. Games without built-in benchmarking tools were tested using the FRAPS utility and the minimal fps rates are also indicated in the diagrams.

We tested graphics cards with the PCI Express x16 interface on the following testbed:

Sticking to our standard testing procedure, we set up the drivers from ATI and NVIDIA in the following way:

ATI CATALYST 5.7:

CATALYST A.I.: Standard

Mipmap Detail Level: Quality

Wait for vertical refresh: Always off

Other settings: default

NVIDIA ForceWare 77.72:

Image Settings: Quality

Vertical sync: Off

Trilinear optimization: On

Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off

Anisotropic sample optimization: On

Other settings: default

We turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering from the game menu, if possible. Otherwise, we force the necessary mode from the driver. We do not edit the games’ configuration files. We select the highest graphics quality settings in each game, the same for graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA, but choose the rendering mode depending on the graphics card’s capabilities, i.e. Shader Model 2.0 and 2.0b for graphics cards on ATI’s GPUs and Shader Model 3.0 for products on NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Besides the PowerColor Bravo X700, we tested the following graphics cards:

The GeForce 6600 and RADEON X700 graphics card models were emulated by down-clocking the GeForce 6600 GT and RADEON X700 PRO, respectively. We didn’t test the PowerColor card in the overclocked mode since it turned to have a very poor overclocking potential.